The great German newspaper Die Zeit gives forty eight broadsheet pages to the Frankfurt Book Fair, with a good share, indeed, to Irish writing. "Text is all around you" stands a heading in English, and then comes a roll call, and essays on so many of our leading writers. What may strike the general readers most is the fact that the whole of the coloured, glossy supplement, is devoted to Ireland, and much of that to Aran.
The photographs are as striking as any you may have seen, of the vast slabs of limestone paving, clefts running from the camera lens into the distance, with flowers peeping just above the level, and clefts running across wise, an apparently never ending vista. The writer, Peter Sager and above all, the photographer Andre Rival are, in Seamus Murphy's phrase, Stone Mad. They photograph and write with wonder about the clearing of the little fields of all stones, and the artifice with which these same stones go to build the walls around the sparse grass.
They quote Synge in large headlines, as more or less. "The yearning which draws me to those lonely rocks, is unutterably strong." The rocks being probably the three islands. And James Joyce is here as saying or writing in 1912: "The holy island sleeps like a great shark on the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Picture after picture must lure the central European to this Ultima Thule. The reporter gives us the story of Synge on the middle island, with a couple of unparliamentary adjectives attributed to a local inhabitant.
He is intrigued on this and the big island, by the use of sea weed as fertiliser. "Nowhere have I eaten more tasty potatoes than there." Nowadays, he remarks, they call it organic farming. The world wide success of Tarlach de Blacam's "updated" Aran sweaters, new designs, new materials, but thriving. And then the climb up to Dun Aengus on the big island, mighty leaden grey circular walls on the edge of the cliff. A fortress? A cult centre? And Robert Flaherty's film Man of Aran which, the reporter writes, is run three times a day during the season in the community hall at Kilronan.
Another piece describes Ireland as the country with the highest density of writers in the world. And Joe O'Connor in a sparky article writes that his generation doesn't want to hear any more of redhaired maidens and blind harpers and alcoholic priests and inhibited, guiltladen men like Stephen Dedalus who fear the loss of their virginity.
A good 4 Marks worth.